'With No Moral Code, There Will Be Total Chaos'

Can religion and God be blamed for the violence that has become rampant in different parts of the world? Diplomat, scholar and former Vice-­­President Hamid Ansari takes on a variety of inter-related questions...

- Pranay Sharma

Can religion and God be blamed for the violence that has become rampant in different parts of the world? Why do scores of youngsters take to violence, leading to the death of hundreds of innocent people on a regular basis? Who started the ISIS? Diplomat, scholar and former Vice-­­President Hamid Ansari takes on a variety of inter-related questions in a conversation with Pranay Sharma. Excerpts:

Much of the violence in the world is being committed in the name of God or religion. Is God the problem?

No, absolutely not. The question to be asked is, why a person decides on a course of action that involves violence. One is that the person commits himself to the instrumentalities of violence that once upon a time used to be a lathi or a single-barrel gun. World War I was kicked off, as we know, by a single individual firing one shot from an old-fashioned revolver. Today technology has given us so much more.... The old instruments of violence have not gone away but all these instrumentalities that technology has given us—ostensibly for valid purposes, like national defence or fighting the enemy etc—are now available to all. So what has happened is that a person who decides on a course of violence can easily empower himself with these instrumentalities of violence.

Is that enough?